About

Welcome to my site where I’d love to share all of my knowledge and tips for success to help you take beautiful, eye-catching, colourful underwater photographs, in an easy-to-understand way, so please bear with me whilst I fill in all the underwater pieces of helping compact camera users since 2005 and a bit before whilst living in Mexico.

So who am I?  Well, just to cut what could be a very long story as short as possible, I had a dream to follow sharks around the world and learn about them and their habitats as much as possible.  For more of that story (some people find it inspirational but I just prefer to crack on, carry on smiling and doing something positive) feel free to visit my Ocean Visions Photography page (which is currently being worked on).  What I didn’t have at the time was a) diving experience – I had a huge fear of staying underwater.  I was an incredibly happy snorkelling but anything deeper scared the wetsuit off me and b) any photography knowledge at all.   Was I nervous by all the comments that I needed a rather much larger system to take good photos underwater and that I needed to be a diver – well …. maybe a little.  But I preferred to simply close my ears and just keep trying to overcome it all with a small Sony Cybershot 3.1 megapixel camera purchased with a red filter.

Did I have an SLR system at all?  Oh yes and I loved it for it’s speed – wow, you could simply keep your finger on that shutter and it would simply keep going and going, compared to my Cybershot where I had to pan, fire and hope something sharp and identifiable would pop into the frame a looooong time after taking the picture!

And eventually it did, and after going through a mega-shorde of cameras, SLRs, Mirrorless, Compacts, drowning quite a few on the way along with strobes such as Ikelite, Sea & Sea, Epoque, SeaLife and Sea & Sea, different lenses such as Epoque, Sea & Sea, INON, and through this underwater adventure,  I’ve picked up some tips which I’d love to share with you, so that you don’t make the same, sometimes expensive mistakes that I did.

Since 2003 – and those that know me, know that I am shy about my achievements, I’m very proud to have launched shark conservation campaigns with the late most amazing Peter Benchley and our Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, for The Shark Trust, given many talks over the years at both the NEC and London Dive Shows, written for many magazines such as The Sunday Times, Amateur Photographer, DIVE magazine, Thai Airways Magazine as well as a regular column with Sport Diver UK on all things compact.

What is far more amazing, amazing, is that 23 of my guests have done incredibly well and gone on to become compact camera champions themselves, winning so many prestigious awards such as The British Society Underwater Photographer’s Best Beginner, 8 Sport Diver Photo of the Months, Daniel Norwood is now an Editor for Dive PhotoGuide (he came to me as he needed help to master his underwater strobe) and has over 15,000 followers and Erick Higuera, who has scooped The Vision of the Sea Howard Hall Award for Outstanding Achievement, toured with the Ocean Film Festival and his work has been featured in the latest BBC’s Blue Planet Book.  Watch this space for more amazing stories coming soon ….

So if you feel that I fit the photo stop to help you take cracking photographs, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.  I’d really love to help you.

Wishing you lots of happy photo bubble adventures and look forward to seeing your photos

Maria